Terence Davies, who has died aged 77 after a short illness, transformed his poor and often brutal working-class upbringing in Liverpool into a series of overwhelmingly evocative films.
Moments of transcendent beauty nestled alongside instances of lacerating pain. There was a similar division in Davies himself. Here was a man given to brooding, despair and self-loathing that could be lightened unexpectedly by outbreaks of exuberance or glimmers of camp, waspish wit.
The shorts that made his name, and became known as The Terence Davies Trilogy, followed one character, Robert Tucker, from the schoolyard to the grave. It was to be the only work of his with a contemporary setting. “Being in the past makes me feel safe because I understand that world,” he said.
The first part, Children (1976), showed Robert as a bullied, tentatively gay schoolboy, and cleaved closely to Davies’s own life, ending with the death of his “psychotic” father. From there, the trilogy became speculative: Madonna and Child (1980) finds Robert drifting as an adult between the sacred, constricting demands of Catholicism and his own profane, masochistic gay desires. The final part, Death and Transfiguration (1983), imagines him as an elderly man, played by Steptoe and Son’s Wilfrid Brambell, on his deathbed. Robert was also the main character in Davies’s accompanying novel, Hallelujah Now (1984).
His debut feature, the fragmented Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), was comprised of two films made two years apart. Davies reimagined his own childhood from the 1950s, omitting any surrogate character to stand in for himself but showing a family terrorised, as his had been, by its volatile patriarch, played by Pete Postlethwaite.
The use of posed, symmetrical tableaux resembling faded snapshots made the film feel like a stream of mildewed memories floating free of linear narrative; music and voices, often divorced from the action, were vital to the picture’s melancholic force.
“My great love is Eliot’s Four Quartets and these were my modest version of the Four Quartets, based on the suffering of myself and my own family,” he said.
The shoot was understandably taxing for Davies, who was sometimes seen between takes sitting on Postlethwaite’s lap to be comforted. When the actor doubted the veracity of the scene in which his character breaks a broom across the back of his own daughter, Davies handed him his sister’s telephone number and said: “Call her.”
A greater helping of euphoria and hope shone through in The Long Day Closes (1992). Featuring a young central character based on Davies and even sharing his nickname (“Bud”), it dwelt on the happiest years of his childhood, as well as his rapturous love of cinema. His mastery of the long, ceremonial tracking shot gazing down on its subjects reached new expressive heights here, though the film-maker’s combined torments – he was unhappily gay, plagued by Catholic guilt and haunted by the sadism and tyranny he had been subjected to by his father, school-mates and teachers – were never far away.
Once he had apparently exhausted the events of his own past, he carried over the poised, precious sensibility of those early films into a run of literary adaptations, most notably Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1999), as well as dramatisations of the lives of literary figures: Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion (2016), Siegfried Sassoon in his final film, Benediction (2021). Whether mining his own life or other people’s, Davies brought the same formalist rigour, visual grandeur and thematic concerns (religion, repression, the sublimity of art and popular culture) to whatever he did.
He was born in Liverpool, the youngest of the 10 children of Helen (nee O’Brien) and Thomas Davies. He later rhapsodised about the four-year period beginning with the death from cancer of his father, who was a rag-and-bone man, when he was seven. “I was conscious of being ecstatically happy but knowing it was going to go,” he said. Sure enough, that bliss came to an end when he started secondary school, Sacred Heart Roman Catholic boys’ school. “The first day, these lads saw their victim – and I was beaten up every day for the next four years.”
After leaving school, he worked as a shipping office clerk and a book-keeper at an accountancy firm for 10 years, then enrolled at Coventry Drama School in 1973.
While there, he wrote the script for Children, which was funded by the BFI Production Board, making him part of a vital wave of new British talent that also included Bill Douglas, Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman. The experience of directing it was a traumatic one – he was openly disdained by his crew – but the film itself was a triumph, crowned by a miraculous shot of Robert and his mother standing on the doorstep, their reflection in the hearse window erased as the father’s coffin is slid into the back of the vehicle.
Having completed Children, Davies went back to drama school to finish his degree. In 1976, he returned to book-keeping in Liverpool, before being accepted into the National Film School in 1979, where he made Madonna and Child as his graduation film.
After the success of Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, he directed an adaptation of John Kennedy Toole’s novel The Neon Bible (1995), set in 1940s Georgia and starring Gena Rowlands. When he cast Gillian Anderson in The House of Mirth as Lily Bart, who pays the price for breaching social etiquette in 19th-century New York, he did so without having seen or even heard of the actor’s hit TV series The X-Files. “It’s about the paranormal, they say. Well, the only paranormal I know is the internal revenue service.”
Though the film was warmly received, he spent the next eight years in the wilderness, unable to get a project financed and given to raging publicly at the UK Film Council, which had refused to fund his adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel Sunset Song (which he finally made in 2015 with Peter Mullan and the model Agyness Deyn).
The dry spell was broken with his personal documentary Of Time and the City (2008), which reflected on the beloved Liverpool of his childhood and put him back on track creatively. It proved that there was still an appreciative audience for his mix of sentimentality, barbed nostalgia and withering, dyspeptic observation; in his voiceover for the film, he could be heard dismissing the Beatles as resembling “a firm of provincial solicitors” and calling the 1947 wedding of Queen Elizabeth II “the start of the Betty Windsor show” over footage of gunships that appeared to be opening fire on the happy couple.
Though Davies’s return was widely celebrated by critics, there were exceptions. Sukhdev Sandhu in the Telegraph called the documentary “a relentlessly maudlin drool of clichés and sentiment” and disdained Davies’s earlier autobiographical features as “art-house versions of [the Carla Lane sitcom] Bread”.
In returning him to cinema after so long away, the film represented the second of two decisive new starts in his career – the first being his move away from straightforwardly autobiographical material in 1995 – and ensured that he would rarely be undervalued or overlooked again. He directed an adaptation of Terrence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea (2011) starring Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston, then cast Cynthia Nixon of Sex and the City as Dickinson in A Quiet Passion and divided the role of Sassoon in Benediction between Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi.
Though the focus in his films had shifted away from himself, these later pictures were no less personal. “When Emily says, ‘I have many faults, there is much to rectify’ – well, that’s me,” he said in an interview for the Guardian last year. “Sassoon was looking for redemption. I was as well, until I realised that you can’t find it if it’s not in you.”
For all the suffering he put on screen, there was an enduring euphoria, too, and he remained as fervent an evangelist for cinema as Martin Scorsese. “Terry is a whirlwind of passion,” said the actor Eric Stoltz, who starred in The House of Mirth. “He’s a Tasmanian devil crossed with Doris Day. He gets so passionately involved in everything he does that he becomes a dervish of activity and emotion.”
One of his greatest memories was being taken to see Singin’ in the Rain by his sister at the age of seven. “During that scene in the rain, I cried and cried and cried,” he recalled in 1995. “She asked, ‘Why are you crying?’, and I told her, ‘Because he looks so happy!’ Nothing does that for me like the old Hollywood musicals. I love [Bergman’s] Cries and Whispers, too, but it’s hardly a toe-tapper, is it? I wish I could say I’d made something as great as Singin’ in the Rain but alas, no, I haven’t.” Perhaps not. But few would disagree that he came close more than once.
He is survived by his siblings Helen and John.
• Terence Davies, film-maker, born 10 November 1945; died 7 October 2023
